Fail: Behind China's Pop-Up City Flop

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Fail: Behind China's Pop-Up City Flop

Stamp: Yeehaw Industries Dongtan, a low-carbon, utopian "eco-city" the Chinese planned to build from scratch on empty wetlands near Shanghai, had us totally psyched two years ago (issue 15.05). We wrote that every block of British architectural firm Arup's plan for Dongtan was "engineered in response to China's environmental crisis. It's like the source code for an urban operating system." In our defense: Shanghai was at the peak of its economic power, and the claim that half a million people would live in this green, carless town by 2050 wasn't insane. It was awesome.

Seems we got a smidgen ahead of ourselves. The bridge and tunnel connecting the island of Chongming to Shanghai got built, but nothing else did (except for a few awful condo towers), and it looks like nothing else will. The mayor of Shanghai, who was pushing the project, was arrested for fraud in an unrelated case and sentenced to 18 years. Now no one wants to deal with the city of the future.

We regret nothing. As the planet gets more urbanized, cities need a fundamental rethink. So what if Dongtan doesn't happen? Famed architect Norman Foster has a similarly ambitious eco-city project going on in Abu Dhabi. Hopefully, that one really will be awesome.